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A great steamer attached to a number of canal boats lay as a thin black line in the center of the lake. An owl left the branches of the hut tree and circled into the safety of the shore willows, and a stealthy barn cat, with thread-like legs, crept from the water's edge toward the lane with a trailing dead fish in his jaws.
Our host, a fine handsome man of perhaps forty years of age, with a quick eye, and singularly intelligent gestures, informed me, as we set out from home, that I should find, at the water's side, the same Austrian officer who had sat at our table over-night, "For he is a keen sportsman," added he, "and having no other employment, devotes almost all his mornings either to angling or shooting."
Unlike the turbid, black and almost stagnant water in the canals which they had been passing during the day's march, the tiny wavelets which rippled in upon the adjacent beach were crystal clear, and gave off the fresh, wholesome smell of pure water; and when, a little later, Earle rose languidly to his feet, and advancing a few paces to the water's edge, scooped up a handful of the liquid and tasted it, he expressed the opinion that it was quite wholesome enough for drinking purposes.
There, at nightfall, the Christians relieved the slaves for some hours at their benches, and the next morning the circle of hills round Genoa, with the city nestling at their feet on the water's edge, and climbing for some distance up their slopes, was in view. Caretto at once suggested that it would be well to signal to the fleet to lie to.
Instead of coasting round this bay, we passed through a channel cut across the spit into Melville water. Here is a beautiful site for a house: a sloping lawn, covered with fine peppermint trees, which in form resemble the weeping willow, and a great variety of flowering shrubs, down to the water's edge.
After a checkered career, in which this ancient craft had breasted the waves of innumerable seas and withstood the storms of nearly three centuries, she was burned to the water's edge here in the harbor of Santiago a few years since, and sunk, where her remains now lie, covered with slime and barnacles, a striking emblem of the nation whose flag she once proudly bore.
Save for the soft dip of oars, not a sound broke the night. Yet it was not silence so much as the sense of deep respiration, as if the earth slept and sent up an invocation to the watching heavens. The banks were thickly weeded at the water's edge with nipa, and behind that were knolls of bamboo with here and there a gnarled and tortured tree shape silhouetted against the faint sky.
"The water's fine to-day," said Peter Mink. "I've been in and out of it forty times." But Master Meadow Mouse wasn't to be persuaded so easily. "I might spoil your fishing if I went in now," he remarked. "I don't care if you do," said Peter Mink. "The pleasure of seeing you enjoy a swim would more than repay me for the loss of the biggest fish in this brook."
It is a most beautiful old house, centuries old, and we had a romantic evening, first at supper in a long narrow pannelled room lit by candles, and then on the terrace beneath my window, where larkspurs grow against the low wall along the water's edge.
"Whatna big water's yon?" he said, wi' his puir mind aye rinnin' on waters. "That's the Solloway," says I. "The Solloway," says he; "it's a big water, and it wad be an ill job to ford it." "Nae man ever fordit it," I said. "But I never yet cam to the water I couldna ford," says he. "But what's that queer smell i' the air? Something snell and cauld and unfreendly."
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